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Facebook’s initial public offering in May was supposed to be the bellwether for an expected pile of IPOs this year, but the subsequent dive in the social network’s shares appeared to put new offerings into a deep freeze. Now, it looks like the mini-Ice Age for IPOs is starting to thaw.

Today, two companies that were widely expected to file for an IPO before Facebook’s IPO faceplant, said they plan to go public this month. Internet security firm Palo Alto Networks aims to raise up to $175 million with an offering at $34 to $37 a share. Kayak, which had put off an IPO expected late last year, also priced its offering, hoping to raise $87.5 million at $22 to $25 a share.

Given that Facebook’s IPO was supposed to be a sure thing–and most assuredly wasn’t–there’s certainly no guarantee that these two companies will help bring back the IPO market. Investors will be cautious about every new IPO, not only because of Facebook, but because of the poor subsequent performances of tech IPOs such as Groupon and Zynga. What’s more, the economy is simply too uncertain to bet on a momentum-driven market like IPOs.

Nonetheless, successful IPOs by Palo Alto Networks and Kayak–on top of another recent IPO success by ServiceNow in June–would inject new life into the technology investment cycle. Indeed, investors such as YCombinator’s Paul Graham have warned that Facebook’s face plant has already cooled early-stage tech investment. So any revival would be positive for the innovation and growth that comes out of that cycle. …

If there’s one thing that gave investors pause about Facebook’s underwhelming initial public offering last month–besides Nasdaq’s royal screwup–it was that the social network has been AWOL from the hottest trend in tech today: mobile. Facebook admitted shortly before its IPO that it wasn’t making any money on mobile advertising even as its users increasingly access the service from their smartphones and tablets.

But it’s also quite early in the opportunities associated with skyrocketing use of mobile devices, whether it’s games or advertising or payments. Lucy Jacobs, COO at Spruce Media, a company that helps brands do performance advertising on Facebook, offered a brief perspective on what Facebook and brands hoping to use it for marketing can do to make money from all the people ditching their PCs for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Here’s what she had to say during a talk at AlwaysOn’s OnMobile conference in Redwood City, Calif.:

Only about 32% of the world has a mobile phone so far, she says, and most of them aren’t smartphones, so there’s plenty of opportunity. We’re currently monetizing only 1% of all ad impressions even though 10% of time is spent on mobile devices. Result: Ad rates are five times lower on mobile devices vs. desktops.

Facebook is well-positioned to monetize mobile, Jacobs says. Why? Very rapid user growth, large number of innovative developers, broad base of advertisers, highly engaged consumers, and apps that are essential utilities.

Facebook now has four formats, or locations, for mobile ads–in the news feed on the home page, in the news feed in mobile, on the right-hand side, and on the log-out page. And last week, it announced the ability to run just mobile ads instead of having to do desktop and mobile ads simultaneously.

The mobile newsfeed ads have really high engagement and good results, Jacobs says. Click-through rates are 1% to 5%, or 10 times higher than on standard Facebook ads. That suggests that mobile has a huge upside for Facebook, since clicks on its other ads are way lower than the average display ad.

However, conversion rates, or the rate at which people buy something, fill out a form, or the like, are one-third lower. She doesn’t say why. Other marketers and agencies have suggested that it’s likely people using their devices on the go, such as in or near stores, simply buy the product in the store, but that purchase doesn’t get attributed to the Facebook ad.

Jacobs offers several tips and tricks for brands using mobile ads on Facebook:

Facebook’s growth is slowing in the U.S.–a lot, according to comScore figures cited in a Wall Street Journal story this morning. The rate at which the number of U.S. users is growing fell to just 5%, down from 24% a little over a year ago.

Clearly the implication of the article is that this is a Bad Thing, and for many online companies, it would be. Not for Facebook, though. Here’s why:

* How could Facebook’s growth, at least in the U.S., not slow down? It now claims 158 million users, nearly three-quarters of everyone who’s on the Internet in the U.S. It’s mathematically impossible to keep up growth rates when there’s almost no one else left to join.

I did my annual predictions first on my Forbes blog, The New Persuaders, since they’re focused largely on the Internet media and advertising I cover there. On that blog, they’re done as separate posts, but I wanted to gather them up in one place here, as I’ve done in previous years. So here’s what I think will happen (or in some cases, not happen) this year in my corner of the technology and startup world:

Facebook goes public, but won’t start an IPO landslide: Facebook will make the signature stock offering of the decade, one that reportedly will value the social network at up to $100 billion. But it won’t launch a thousand IPOs as a gazillion venture capitalists and angel investors hope.

Of course, the first part of that prediction is a gimme. But I can’t go without mentioning it because the Facebook IPO will be one of the biggest stories of 2012. Assuming Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley don’t stumble in pricing and selling the offering, Facebook’s IPO will be every bit as important as Google’s in 2004. It will be a sign that Facebook is a real, sustainable company (if there was any doubt left by now), but also a sign that social networking is getting woven into the fabric of our entire online experience.

The second part of the prediction depends less on how the Facebook IPO goes than on how (or whether) the economy recovers. If the recover remains slow to nonexistent and the stock market reflects that, IPOs will be sparse. If we get the slow but growing economic improvement we seem to be seeing now, more companies will go public but not a gusher. But the point is that Facebook is such a singular success that it’s not going to set the tone for lesser (often far lesser) Internet companies.

Facebook’s ad business booms–but not at Google’s expense: Facebook’s social advertising looks promising, but won’t come close to challenging Google’s huge success in search ads this year–maybe ever.

Obviously, Facebook is having no problem raking in the bucks from advertisers eager to reach its 800 million-plus audience–or more specifically, the millions of people in whatever target markets they choose. EMarketer reckons the company will gross nearly $6 billion in ad revenues this year, up from $4 billion in 2011. And that’s before we know anything about Facebook’s likely plans for mobile ads or an ad network a la Google’s AdSense that would spread its ads around the Web.

From reading a lot of articles, you’d think Facebook is stealing all that money directly from Google. That’s not mainly the case, given Google’s own considerable growth in display advertising, though Facebook’s success may well blunt that growth in the future. Instead, Facebook currently is eating Yahoo’s and AOL’s lunches, and those of many ad networks that, until Facebook ramped up its ad business, were the main alternative for advertisers looking to target sizable audiences.

What would make Facebook a huge Google-scale company is the theft of an entirely different meal: television advertising. After all, Facebook shows much more promise as a brand advertising medium than a direct-marketing medium like Google. It needs only to draw a small fraction of the $60 billion or so spent on television advertising, the biggest brand medium, to be enormously successful. But even then, it’s not mainly a Facebook vs. Google contest.

Facebook still needs to answer a big question, however. That’s whether its “social ads,” which incorporate people’s friends in ads in a 21st century version of word-of-mouth marketing, will have nearly the effectiveness in driving attention and ultimately sales as search ads, which appear in direct response to related queries, often involving products people are looking to buy. The potential is intriguing, and there are some nice examples of how well social advertising can work.

But despite Facebook’s considerable work in providing new kinds of metrics on marketing and advertising impact on its users, marketers and agencies aren’t yet universally convinced they need to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads. After all, they can get a lot of mileage out of their free Facebook Pages and Like buttons around the Web. (Not to mention, it remains to be seen whether these ultra-personal ads will cross what blogger Robert Scoble calls the Facebook freaky line.)

Bottom line: If Facebook is to be the Google of the this decade, its advertising has to at least approach the engagement of search ads, especially as Google itself moves to become more of a brand advertising platform with YouTube and continues its push into display ads. While Facebook is building what seems likely to become a great business on anew vision of advertising that could change many decades of tradition,2012 won’t be the year it closes that deal.

I know I shouldn’t do it–predictions too often are either obvious or wrong–but I can’t help it. If I have to think about what’s coming in 2011, and I do, I might as well inflict those thoughts on the rest of the world. Isn’t that what blogging is all about? Anyway, here’s what I expect to see this year:

* There will be at least one monster initial public offering in tech. Take your pick (in more or less descending order of likelihood): Skype, Groupon, Zynga, Demand Media, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (only if it has to). But despite many stories that will call this event a bellwether, the IPO won’t bring back anything like the bubble days of the late 1990s (and thank goodness for that) because there are still only a few marquee names that can net multibillion-dollar valuations. UPDATE: Well, so much for that descending order. LinkedIn apparently will be the first to file–though whether it will be a “monster” IPO is another question. UPDATE 2: Well, here’s that monster IPO–since it’s hard to believe Facebook won’t go public if it has to disclose financials anyway. But it likely won’t happen until early 2012. Update 3: Now Groupon appears to be leading the IPO derby. Update 4, 1/20/11: Now it looks like Demand Media will be the first out. Again, not sure that’s the monster one, but if it’s successful, more will come.

* App fever will cool. Good apps that encapsulate a useful task or bit of entertainment–Angry Birds, AroundMe, Google Voice–will continue to do well. But those apps that do little more than apply a pretty layer atop Web content won’t get much traction–and moneymaking opportunities are uncertain in any case. The bigger issue: Once HTML5 becomes the widespread standard for creating Web services, enabling much more interactive Web services right from the browser, I wonder whether the need for separate apps will gradually fade. Continue reading →

Somehow I persuaded myself a year ago to offer up predictions for what would happen in 2010–and what wouldn’t happen. Now it’s time to take my medicine and see how I fared.

What I said would happen:

* Merger mania will accelerate in technology, especially acquisitions of smaller firms. OK, so it was a bit of a gimme, but I got that right. Google alone bought more than two dozen.

* Branding will start to become more apparent in Internet advertising, with Google leading the way in display. I guess it became somewhat more prominent a push, but I’d say I was a year too early on this.

* Google’s software efforts will finally establish it as more than a search company, making it apparent what this pony’s second trick is. Android certainly established itself, the Chrome browser made significant gains, and Google Apps got some big new customers. Chrome OS was late, though delivered through an alpha laptop, and remains unproven, and so does Google TV. Overall, it’s an impressive showing, if not enough to identify software as its next trick.

* Yahoo will surprise on the upside, thanks in part to a pickup in brand spending. Wrong! Well, the latter happened, but not enough to buoy a sinking Yahoo. It laid off 4% of its staff and jettisoned once-promising operations. Well, there’s always 2011–and maybe that’s all there will be if CEO Carol Bartz can’t demonstrate that she can finally turn things around.

* Mobile applications will start to take off for the masses. Two words: Angry Birds.

* Twitter’s main business model will become more apparent, but won’t knock everyone’s socks off. That’s just about right.

* Facebook will keep growing, providing perhaps the first test of whether social media is a blockbuster business after all. No doubt about that, even if it’s not yet certain how profitable the company will be.

What I said wouldn’t happen:

* Tablets won’t be the next big thing in client computing. As popular as Apple’s iPad was, tablets didn’t take the world by storm in 2010. But I don’t doubt they’ll be much bigger in 2011.

* There won’t be as many tech IPOs as venture capitalists and startups are hoping. And no, there weren’t, even if 45 did go public, up from 16 in 2009. And none of them were the big names such as Twitter or Facebook that some had hoped for.

* Real-time won’t be a business. When’s the last time you heard that buzzword? Maybe when real-time search engine OneRiot did a layoff?

TechCrunch Disrupt, the tech blog’s annual conference in San Francisco, is underway. I’ll liveblog the highlights of this first panel of luminaries, which is looking at Building Internet Treasures. FYI, John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins, as is Bing Gordon (former longtime creative guy at Electronic Arts), and Mark Pincus is CEO of social game giant Zynga.

Actually, Doerr is soliciting audience questions for everyone, and then they presumably will address them. They’re all over the place–where do you look for new ideas, what about micropayments, the wisdom of developing on a closed platform (in other words, Facebook), is advertising the revenue model for the Internet, what’s the future of companies like Groupon, what matters most for the future of the Internet, what is the future of social games, is the intelligent Web real or a myth, is there a future for Flash vs. HTML5, Internet disruption in health care.

Pincus starts out. 33 million people as of yesterday played a Zynga game. 1200 full-time people. Won’t disclose revenues.

Pincus says the best companies are creating products and services that we now can’t imagine living without–Amazon, Google, etc. That’s what an Internet “treasure” is. He says Zynga measures its users’ “net promotion score,” which has to do with how much they spread the word of their game experiences to others, if I understand correctly.

Doerr says he’s getting a different sense of games culture today–more analytical than creative. “We’re data junkies. We measure everything,” he says, and Zynga has invested in big data warehouses–more than a petabyte of data a day. “We’re adding a thousand servers a week.” Yikes.

But, he adds, design and creativity still really matters.

Doerr: What is disruptive about social games? Gordon: Four big disruptions from the Internet: Social, analytics, APIable Internet (app economy) and new payment methods. What’s disruptive about social games is that they combine all four in one. Pincus: In summer 2007, I was here for the Facebook apps platform launch (so was I). Games and fun were not a big macro on the Internet yet. The disruptive thing for me was not apps and platforms, but that they took down the barriers to entry to playing games–you could now design games that three clicks in, you know how to play them.

Doerr: Is the social Web going to create other great possibilities beyond games? Pincus: We are going through the biggest change in Internet consumer behavior since using the browser. Somebody will become the travel icon on my phone–and be that throughout the Web as a result. Health is waiting for someone to turn it into a consumer product that’s useful.

Turns out John Doerr’s daughter Mary, in high school when meeting Pincus along with her dad and Gordon to assess whether Kleiner would invest in Zynga, sealed the deal by saying, “He’s cool.”

Pincus: Wanted to keep control of the company to avoid “death by a thousand compromises.”

Doerr: Zynga has the notion that every employee is a CEO. That can’t be right, can it? Pincus: We sure try. People have to define what they’re the CEO of, and how they’re going to kill it (that goal).

Doerr: Is it the app economy? Pincus: Every consumer behavior on the Web is going to become an app and a new kind of industry. Consumers are going to expect the way they interact with a service is an app.

Will there be a revenue stream besides advertising? Pincus: I’m a big believer in the user-pay economy. Just as offline, ads will eventually be a small part of the overall Internet economy. Advertising [online] is only a $50 billion industry–smaller than the auto industry.

Pincus: We’re still far far away from being an Internet treasure. People can still imagine life without playing our games. Gordon: I don’t know, I was harvesting wheat at 6:15 this morning. Pincus: We have to make the daily grind have more meaning. It’s a big challenge.